[Illustration: Grant Allen.]
L I N N E T
_=A R O M A N C E=_
_ B y _ G R A N T A L L E N
_Author of_ “UNDER SEALED ORDERS,”
“MISS CAYLEY’S ADVENTURES,” ETC.
_N e w Y o r k_ : : : N E W A M S T E R D A M
B O O K C O M P A N Y : : : : _M C M_
COPYRIGHT, 1900
BY
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
NOTE
This story was written in the midst of the scenery which
it describes; but the author desires to acknowledge his
obligations for many touches of local colour to Mr.
Baillie-Grohman’s admirable work on “Tyrol and the
Tyrolese.” The quatrain on p. 283 is quoted, with
some slight modifications (to adapt it to its place
in this novel), from a poem by Mr. William Watson.
CONTENTS
I. “TO INTRODUCE MR FLORIAN WOOD”
II. A FRESH ACQUAINTANCE
III. WITHIN SIGHT OF A HEROINE
IV. ENTER LINNET
V. THE WIRTH’S THEORY
VI. THE ROBBLER
VII. WAGER OF BATTLE
VIII. THE HUMAN HEART
IX. THE MAN OF THE WORLD
X. HAIL, COLUMBIA!
XI. PRIVATE INQUIRY
XII. THE MADDING CROWD
XIII. A FIRST NIGHT
XIV. AND IF FOR EVER
XV. A CRITICAL EVENING
XVI. SCHLOSS TYROL
XVII. CAUGHT OUT
XVIII. TAKEN BY SURPRISE
XIX. SPIRITUAL WEAPONS
XX. FLORIAN ON MATRIMONY
XXI. FORTUNE’S WHEEL
XXII. A WOMAN’S STRATAGEM
XXIII. A PROPHET INDEED!
XXIV. THE ART OF PROPHESYING
XXV. A DRAMATIC VENTURE
XXVI. A WOMAN’S HEART
XXVII. AULD LAND SYNE
XXVIII. SIGNORA CASALMONTE
XXIX. FROM LINNET’S STANDPOINT
XXX. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
XXXI. WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK
XXXII. WEDDED FELICITY
XXXIII. PLAYING WITH FIRE
XXXIV. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
XXXV. GOLDEN HOPES
XXXVI. AN ECCLESIASTICAL QUESTION
XXXVII. BEGINNINGS OF EVIL
XXXVIII. HUSBAND OR LOVER?
XXXIX. DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
XL. OPEN WAR
XLI. GOD’S LAW—OR MAN’S?
XLII. PRUDENCE
XLIII. LINNET’S RIVAL
XLIV. AND WILL’S
XLV. BY AUTHORITY
XLVI. HOME AGAIN!
XLVII. SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED
XLVIII. THE BUBBLE BURSTS
XLIX. THE PIGEON FLIES HOME
L. ANDREAS HAUSBERGER PAYS
LI. EXIT FRANZ LINDNER
LII. A CONFESSION OF FAITH
L I N N E T
CHAPTER I
“TO INTRODUCE MR FLORIAN WOOD”
’Twas at Zell in the Zillerthal.
Now, whoever knows the Alps, knows the Zillerthal well as the centre of
all that is most Tyrolese in the Tyrol. From that beautiful green
valley, softly smiling below, majestically grand and ice-clad in its
upper forks and branches, issue forth from time to time all the
itinerant zither-players and picturesquely-clad singers who pervade
every capital and every spa in Europe. Born and bred among the rich
lawns of their upland villages, they come down in due time, with a
feather in their hats and a jodel in their throats, true modern
troubadours, setting out on the untried ocean of the outer world—their
voice for their fortune—in search of wealth and adventures. Guitar on
back and green braces on shoulders, they start blithely from home with a
few copper kreuzers in their leather belts, and return again after a
year or two, changed men to behold, their pockets full to bursting with
dollars or louis or good English sovereigns.
Not that you must expect to see the Tyrolese peasant of sober reality
masquerading about in that extremely operatic and brigand-like costume
in the upper Zillerthal. The Alpine minstrel in the sugar-loaf hat,
much-gartered as to the legs, and clad in a Joseph’s coat of many
colours, with whom we are all so familiar in cosmopolitan concert-halls,
has donned his romantic polychromatic costume as an integral part of the
business, and would be regarded with surprise, not unmixed with
contempt, were he to appear in it among the pastures of his native
valley. The ladies in corset-bodices and loose white lawn sleeves, who
trill out startling notes from the back attics of their larynx, or
elicit sweet harmonies from mediæval-looking mandolines in Kursaals and
Alcazars, have purchased their Tyrolese dress direct from some Parisian
_costumier_. The real cowherds and milkmaids of the actual Zillerthal
are much more prosaic, not to say commonplace, creatures. A green string
for a hat-band, with a blackcock’s plume stuck jauntily or saucily at
the back of the hat, and a dirty red lappel to the threadbare coat, is
all that distinguishes the Tyrolese mountaineer of solid fact from the
universal peasant of European Christendom. Indeed, is it not true, after
all, that the stage has led us to expect far too much—in costume and
otherwise—from the tillers of the soil everywhere? Is it not true that
the agricultural and pastoral classes all the world over, in spite of
Theocritus and Thomas Hardy, are apt, when one observes them impartially
in the flesh, to be earthy, grimy, dull-eyed, and unintelligent?
Florian Wood didn’t think so, however, or affected not to think
so—which in his case was probably very much the same thing; for what he
_really_ thought about anything on earth, affectation aside, it would
have puzzled even himself not a little to determine. He was a tiny man
of elegant proportions: so tiny, so elegant, that one felt inclined to
put him under a glass case and stick him on a mantelpiece. He leant his
small arms upon the parapet of a wall as they were approaching Zell,
shifted the knapsack on his back with sylph-like grace, and murmured
ecstatically, with a side glance at the stalwart peasant-women carrying
basketfuls of fodder in huge creels on their backs in the field close
by, “How delicious! How charming! How essentially picturesque! How
characteristically Tyrolean!”
His companion scanned him up and down with an air of some passing
amusement. “Why, I didn’t know you’d ever been in the Tyrol before,” he
objected, bluntly. And, in point of fact, when they started together
from Munich that morning on their autumn tour, Florian Wood had never
yet crossed the Austrian frontier. But what of that? He had got out of
the train some five hours back at Jenbach station, and walked the
sixteen miles from there to Zell; and in the course of the tramp he had
matured his views on the characteristics of the Tyrol.
But he waved one lily-white hand over the earth none the less with airy
dismissal of his friend’s implied criticism. “How often shall I have to
tell you, my dear Deverill,” he said blandly, in his lofty didactic
tone—the tone which, as often happens with very small men, came most
familiarly of all to him—“that you unduly subordinate the ideal to the
real, where you ought rather to subordinate the real to the ideal. This,
you say, is the Tyrol—the solid, uncompromising, geographically
definite Tyrol of the tax-gatherer, the post-master, and the commercial
traveller—bounded on the north by Bavaria, on the south by Italy, on
the east by the rude Carinthian boor, and on the west by the collection
of hotels and pensions marked down on the map as the Swiss Republic.
Very well then; let me see if there’s anything Tyrolese at all to be
found in it. I have instinctive within me a picture of the true, the
ideal Tyrol. I know well its green pastures, its upland slopes, its
innocent peasantry, its fearless chamois-hunters, its beautiful,
guileless, fair-haired maidens. Arriving by rail to-day in this its
prosaic prototype—cast up, as it were, from the train on the sea-coast
of this Bohemia—I turn my eyes with interest upon the imitation Tyrol
of real life, and strive earnestly to discover some faint points of
resemblance, if such there be, with the genuine article as immediately
revealed to me.”
“And you find none?” Deverill put in, smiling.
Florian waved that dainty Dresden china hand expansively once more over
the landscape before him, as if it belonged to him. “Pardon me,” he
said, sententiously; “in many things, I admit, the reality might be
improved upon. The mountains, for example, should be higher, their forms
more varied, their peaks more jagged, their sides more precipitous; the
snow should drape them with more uniform white, regardless of the petty
restrictions of gravity; the river should tear down far rockier ravines,
in more visible cataracts. But Nature has sometimes her happy moments,
too. And I call this one of them! Those women, now, so Millet-like in
their patient toil—how sympathetic! how charming! A less primitive
society, a less idyllic folk, would have imposed such burdens upon a
horse or a donkey. The Tyrol knows better. It is more naïve, more
picturesque—in one word, more original. It imposes them on the willing
neck of beautiful woman!”
“It’s terribly hard work for them,” Deverill answered, observing them
with half a sigh.
“For _them_? Ah, yes, I admit it, of course, poor souls!—but for _me_,
my dear fellow—for _me_, just consider! It gives me a thrill of the
intensest sensibility. In the first place, the picture is a beautiful
one in itself—the figures, the baskets, the frame, the setting. In the
second place, it suggests to the observant mind an Arcadian life, a true
Dorian simplicity. In the third place—which is perhaps the most
important of all—it affords me an opportunity for the luxury of
sympathy. What is the trifling inconvenience of a heavy load on their
backs to these poor ignorant creatures, compared with the refined and
artistic pleasure—of an altruistic kind—which I derive from pitying
them?”
“Florian!” his friend said, surveying him comically from head to foot,
“you really are _impayable_. It’s no use arguing with you; it only
flatters you. You know very well in your heart you never mean a word of
anything you say; so stop your nonsense and put yourself in marching
order again. Let’s get on to Zell, and see what sort of quarters we can
find in the village.”
Florian Wood came down at once from his epicurean clouds, and strode out
with his little legs in the direction of their resting-place. In spite
of his tininess, he was a capital walker. If Nature, as he averred, has
sometimes her happy moments, she certainly had one when she created her
critic. Florian Wood was a young man of a delicate habit of mind and
body—a just and pleasing compromise between a philosopher and a
butterfly. His figure was small but extremely graceful; his limbs were
dainty but well-knit and gazelle-like; his face, though small-featured,
was very intelligent, and distinctly good-humoured; his voice was
melodious and exquisitely modulated. And what Nature had left undone,
his godfathers and godmothers did for him at his baptism when they
christened him Florian. As plain John Wood, to be sure, he would have
been nobody at all; as William or Thomas or Henry or George, he would
have been lost in the multitudinous deep sea of London. But his parents
had the glorious inspiration of dubbing him Florian, and it acted like a
charm: all went well in life with him. A baronetcy would have been a far
less valuable social passport—for there are many baronets, but only one
Florian. Before the romantic rarity of that unique Christian name, the
need for a surname paled and faded away into utter nothingness. Nobody
ever dreamt of calling him “Wood”: they spoke of Florian as they once
spoke of “Randolph.” On this somewhat illogical but very natural ground,
he became from his schooldays upward the spoiled child of society. He
was a toy—a plaything. Clubs hung on his clear voice; women petted and
made much of him. When you talk of a man always by his Christian name
alone, depend upon it, he becomes in the end as one of the family: mere
association of ideas begets in you at last a friendly—nay, almost a
fraternal feeling towards him.
They walked along briskly in the direction of Zell, Florian humming as
he went a few stray snatches of Tyrolese songs (or what pass in the
world for such), by way of putting himself in emotional harmony with the
environment. For Florian was modern, intensely modern. He played with
science as he played with everything else; and he could talk of the
environment by the hour with the best of them, in his airy style, as if
environments and he had been lifelong companions. But Zell itself, when
they got to it, failed somehow to come up to either of their
expectations. Florian would have made the valley narrower, or
transplanted the village three hundred feet higher up the slope of the
hill. As for Will Deverill, less critical of Nature’s handicraft, he
found the inns over-civilised; the _Post_ and the _Bräu_ were too fine
for his taste: they had come thus far in search of solitude and Alpine
wilds, and they lighted instead on a sort of miniature Grindelwald, with
half-a-dozen inns, a respectable café, experienced (or in other words
extortionate) guides, and a regular tourist-trap for the sale of
chamois-horns and carved models of châlets. “This will never do!” Will
Deverill exclaimed, gazing round him in disgust at the Greiderer Hotel
and the comfortable Welschwirth. “This is pure civilisation!”
And Florian, looking down instinctively at his dust-encumbered boots,
murmured with a faint sigh, “A perfect Bond Street!” For Florian loved
to do everything “consummately,”—’twas his own pet adverb; he aimed at
universality, but he aimed quite as much at perfection in detail of the
most Pharisaical description. In Piccadilly, he went clad in a faultless
miniature frock-coat, surmounted by the silken sheen of Lincoln and
Bennet’s glossiest; but if he made up his mind to Alps and snow-fields,
then Alps he would have, pure, simple, and unadulterated. No half-way
houses for him! He would commune at first hand with the eternal hills;
he would behold the free life of the mountain folk in all its
unsophisticated and primitive simplicity.
So he gazed at his Tom Thumb boots with a regretful eye, and murmured
pensively once more, “A perfect Bond Street!”
“What shall we do now?” Will Deverill asked, stopping short and glancing
ahead towards the glaciers that close the valley.
“See that village on the left there,” Florian answered, in a rapt tone
of sudden inspiration, seizing his arm theatrically; “—no, _not_ the
lower one on the edge of the level, but that high-perched group of
little wooden houses with the green steeple by the edge of the ravine:
what a magnificent view of the snow-fields to the south! From there, one
must look at a single glance over all the spreading fingers and
ramifications of the valley.”
“Perhaps there’s no inn there,” Will responded, dubiously.
“No inn! You prate to me of inns?” Florian exclaimed, striking an
attitude. “In full view of these virgin peaks, you venture to raise a
question of mere earthly bedrooms—landlord, waiter, chambermaid! Who
cares where he sleeps—or whether he sleeps at all—in such a village as
that?” He struck his stick on the ground hard to enforce and emphasise
the absoluteness of his determination. “The die is cast,” he cried, with
the Caesaric firmness of five-feet-nothing. “We cross the stream at
once, and we make for the village!”
“Well, there’s probably somewhere we can put up for the night and
reconnoitre the neighbourhood,” Will Deverill answered, as he followed
his friend’s lead. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can fall back
upon Zell; but the priest will most likely find us a lodging.”
No sooner said than done. They mounted the steep slope, and rose by
gentle zig-zags towards the upland hamlet. At each step they took, the
view over the glacier-bound peaks that close the glen to southward,
opened wider and wider. Near an Alpine farmhouse they paused for breath.
It was built of brown wood, toned and darkened by age, with projecting
eaves and basking southern front, where endless cobs of Indian corn in
treble tiers and rows hung out drying in the sunshine. Florian drank in
the pretty picture with the intense enjoyment of youth and health and a
rich sensuous nature. There was a human element, too, giving life to the
foreground. Three Tyrolese children, a boy and two girls, in costumes
more obtrusively national than they had yet observed, stood playing with
one another on the platform in front of the farmhouse. Florian beamed on
them, enchanted. “What innocence!” he cried, ecstatically. “What
untrammelled forms! What freedom of limb! What Hellenic suppleness! How
different from the cramped motions of our London-bred children! You can
see in a moment those vigorous young muscles have strengthened
themselves from the cradle in the bracing air of the mountains—so fresh
they are, so lithe, so gracious, so lissom! I recognise there at once
the true note of the Tyrol.”
As he spoke, the younger girl, playing roughly with the boy, gave him a
violent push which nearly sent him over into a neighbouring puddle. At
that, the elder sister clutched her hard by the wrist and gave her a
good shaking, observing at the same time in very familiar accents:
“Naow then, Mariar-Ann, if you do like that to ’Arry agin, I’ll tike you
stright in, an’ tell your mother.”
It was the genuine unmistakable Cockney dialect!
In an agony of injured nerves, Florian seized the elder girl by the
collar of her dress, and, holding her at arm’s-length, as one might do
some venomous reptile, demanded of her, sternly, in his severest tone:
“Now, where on earth did you ever learn English?”
The little Tyrolese, trembling violently in his grasp, stammered out in
deadly fear: “Wy, o’ course, in London.”
“Pa was a waiter at the Criterion,” the younger sister volunteered in a
shrill little voice from a safe distance; “and ma’s an Englishwoman.
We’ve come ’ere to retire. Pa’s tiken the farm. But _we_ can’t none of
us speak any German.”
Florian relaxed his grasp, a dejected, dispirited, disappointed
mannikin. “Go, wretched little mudlark!” he exclaimed, with a frank
gesture of discomfiture, flinging her from him as he spoke. “There
isn’t, there never was, any objective Tyrol!”
The child retreated prudently to the safe shelter of the doorway, before
venturing on a repartee. Then she put out her tongue and took up a stone
in her hand. “Who are you a-callin’ a mudlark?” she answered, with the
just indignation of injured innocence. “If my pa was ’ere ’e’d punch yer
bloomin’ ’ead for yer.”
It ill became Florian Wood, that man of taste, to bandy words before the
eternal hills with social waifs from the slums of Drury Lane. He strode
on up the path in moody silence. It was some minutes, indeed, before he
had sufficiently recovered from this crushing blow to murmur in a
subdued voice: “What an incongruous circumstance!”
“Not so unusual as you’d suppose, though,” his companion answered with a
smile; for he knew the Tyrol. “There are no people on earth so vagrant
in their ways as the Tyrolese. They go away as pedlars, musicians, or
waiters; but when they’ve made their pile, almost without exception,
they come back in the end to their native valleys. I’ve more than once
met hunters or farmers in these upland glens who spoke to me in English,
not always without a tinge of American accent. Perhaps it’s not so much
that these people emigrate as that they always come back again. They
think other countries good enough to make money in, but the Zillerthal’s
the one place where they’d care to spend it.”
Florian answered nothing. He strode on, sore distressed. The only Tyrol
worth tuppence, he now knew to his cost, was the one he had erected,
anterior to experience, in his own imagination.